Out and About – The Xero Spotlight Event in Liverpool
We were delighted to be approached by Xero to present a Spotlight Event in Liverpool as their appointed expert.
The Spotlights give a bit of background on Xero the company and their ethos but focus more on how business owners can make running their business a whole lot easier by using Xero for their cloud-based accounting system.
Part of delivering the Xero Spotlight Event in Liverpool today involved John catching an imaginary ball
The Spotlight centred on three areas applicable to virtually all businesses.
The bank account
Reconciling the company bank accounts can be an arduous process when manual records are maintained but Xero takes away all the pain with an intuitive approach.
The time saving features include:
- Direct feeds to your bank, so that transactions are pulled into Xero automatically each day. No more time consuming data entry
- Xero makes suggestions – it does a good job of recognising transactions it’s seen before and suggesting where you need to post it to
- You can set up bank rules for repeating customers or suppliers. It takes 30 seconds to set a rule up but then you’re done reconciling the bank becomes super fast
Raising an online invoice
Sending online invoices mean you get paid quicker, in particular when used in conjunction with a payment processor such as eWay. Xero’s own statistics indicate that online invoicing has led to a 30% reduction in the time it takes businesses to get paid.
Other features include:
- Customisable invoice templates
- Add attachments to your invoices, e.g. time sheets, terms and conditions, technical drawings
- Automation of repeating invoices to customers you bill fixed amounts to each month
- Set up your Inventory to allow quick population of invoices with products or services you frequently sell
- Full audit trail – see when your customer has opened your invoice
- Invoice reminders to automate your credit control
Files
Xero has a brilliant Files facility. You can attach documents to customers or suppliers, for example copies of contracts. You can also attach files to fixed assets so you always have access to the respective warranties and guarantees.
You can add files in three different ways:
- Directly from your desktop
- Via a special email address so you can email documents straight into Xero – it’s quite a complicated address so just save it as a contact
- From your phone or tablet’s photo library via the Xero app
If you want to improve how you use Xero just fill in our diagnostic and we’ll give you plenty of ideas.
